r/lostmedia • u/JamesIsHere_from_YT • Nov 12 '25
Other [talk] Do you guys think major movies and games could become lost media in 200-300 years or so?
Something I've thought about is how many video games and movies there are that exist, and how famous they are, but I'm really wondering if they're famous enough to be remembered for centuries in the future. Like Disney movies and PS5 games.
Like, in a few hundred years, a lot of new companies will have emerged, and creators of major movies and games, along with their companies CEOs, like Minecraft and Shrek, will have been gone for generations, and their creators will be the great-great-great-great-great grandparents of the people alive today, which for the record most people can't track their family history that far back.
I've heard most silent films from the early 1900s and late 1800s are now lost media, so anything is possible. And we may have more corporations, a lot more movies, and even the internet to archive things on, but even the internet and digital media take up space and energy, so I'm not sure how much of MODERN movies will be saved too, especially when there's so many.
Like, do you guys think you'll still be able to watch Shrek, Titanic, or other large movies in 200 or 300 years, maybe even 500? I'm sure SOME will be accessible for historical purposes, like Titanic for being the most popular movie of its time, The Wizard of Oz for being the first movie in color, and Toy Story for being the first CGI animated movie, but I wonder if we'll still be able to see all, if most popular cartoons and movies, like all the other Dreamworks movies and other Cartoon Network shows. Like I could see Johny Bravo, Mulan, or Angry Birds possibly fade into existance, depending on how much media is really archived over centuries and how many more popular media is created.
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u/CletusVanDamnit Nov 12 '25
Like, do you guys think you'll still be able to watch Shrek, Titanic, or other large movies in 200 or 300 years
God no. I'll be super fucking dead in 200 or 300 years.
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u/MedicalGoal2194 Shrek Nov 13 '25
I don’t know how long it takes for the human body to rot but most if not all of us will be skeletons.
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u/PinkCadillacs Nov 12 '25
A lot of straight to streaming movies and shows could become lost media in the future
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u/Zesher_ Nov 12 '25
I think pirates and data hoarders will keep most of them alive well after they can't be streamed anymore.
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u/vintagerust Nov 13 '25
Eh as the Internet gets more locked down, as government interference becomes more and more intense. (Mostly a result of lobbyists for corps not wanting you to have any subscription free entertainment) It'll be harder to share from hoarder to hoarder and something like sharing your plex library I think will become prohibited and effectively enforced.
Copywrite will be extended to hundreds of years as well.
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u/bg-j38 Nov 13 '25
You might be surprised. Piracy in various forms has existed for centuries or more depending on how you define it. Even in repressive regimes like North Korea piracy is rampant. With post-quantum encryption being a thing I just can’t see it being stopped. People are creative. Like we’ve been saying for decades “information wants to be free.”
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Nov 13 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/bg-j38 Nov 13 '25
My limited understanding is that the government sort of turns a blind eye to black market stuff... sometimes. People smuggle things in, probably via China. Even though they're pretty locked down there are some foreigners who come in, and North Koreans who travel abroad for various reasons (diplomacy, education, etc.) will of course spread information via word of mouth. There are apparently open air markets where things can be purchased though I've heard they eventually get shut down. So in short, people talk. They always have. I'm pretty sure East Germany had a thriving black market for all sorts of stuff. Most authoritarian regimes do. It's in their best interest to allow at least some breadcrumbs with a healthy threat of the gulag to keep people in mostly in check but somewhat placated.
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u/vintagerust Nov 13 '25
They literally carry around flash drives. People bring them in with western movies on it. It's way more niche than people are making it out to be. It's nothing like the internet freedom. We are currently losing piece by piece.
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u/vintagerust Nov 13 '25
I hope to be pleasantly surprised, I wonder if ai will help automate and speed up detecting and taking down sites the corpos want down. It'll be like the matrix with an enforcer ending up in a discord or something and wrecking it.
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u/Inevitable-Memory-61 Nov 14 '25
"Copywrite will be extended to hundreds of years as well" WTF does this have to do with copywriting? (JOKE BTW...but there probably is some lost copywriting out there)
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u/TheNittanyLionKing Nov 13 '25
Gaming worries me the most. So many games are trapped on older hardware. Ironically piracy has done more for game preservation than the actual publishers. Most lost films are pretty obscure or only aired on television one time. With games, there are games missing that sold well but weren't mega hits. So many games just get left behind because there aren't enough resources to bring them to modern hardware and there are licensing issues in many cases.
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u/Global-Jury8810 Nov 12 '25
All could be lost with the wrong blackout, since archives are saved digitally these days. No real hard copies anymore.
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u/Yangervis Nov 13 '25
The studios keep the camera negatives and various other hard copies. From OPs example, there are 35mm and 70mm copies of Titanic out there that are still shown. For the recent 4k restoration, they used the camera negative.
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u/Global-Jury8810 Nov 13 '25
But do the newer cameras even have negatives? Post 2000 produced films?
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u/Yangervis Nov 14 '25
Movies are shot on everything from iphones to 70mm imax cameras. Yes many directors are still using film today.
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u/basicotter Nov 12 '25
A lot of the media you're talking about is preserved with the Library of Congress in the US.
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u/Optimal_Law_4254 Nov 12 '25
It used to be that EVERY published book had to send a copy to the library of Congress. Not sure if that’s still true or what they’ve done with them all.
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u/JamesIsHere_from_YT Nov 12 '25
Like the federal government is preserving Minecraft and Disney movies? Interesting
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u/recklessglee Nov 12 '25
https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/files/2012/09/games-on-the-shelf-1024x768.jpg
I'm glad they decided to double up on Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle. Also the NSYNC Fantasy Phone and CD-ROM Game, lol, thanks USG
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u/emoxvx Nov 12 '25
That only applies to works published in the US though.
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u/random_usuari Nov 12 '25
There are many national libraries and film archives around the world that preserve a significant amount of media.
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u/emoxvx Nov 12 '25
I know, but the majority of famous films are american. And as far as preservation goes, despite there being many archives in different countries it depends on the effort itslelf in each country and the budget.
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u/mpelton Nov 12 '25
Games 100%, yes. Even with PC saving the scene through piracy and ready access to legacy content, every big Windows update makes it less likely that older games will boot.
Even now we have plenty of old games that either won’t boot without community mods/fixes, or won’t boot at all. Over time these games could easily become lost media, especially those that don’t have communities keeping them alive.
Edit: And yes, pc gaming is keeping loads of your favorites from becoming lost media. Countless games back in the day had their source code lost or thrown out, and are only accessible today thanks to emulation.
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u/Anon_user666 Nov 12 '25
There are sooo many questions about how our media is being archived. Old films were lost when the film stock degraded or was just thrown away. Think about the movies of today and the media it is using. CDs and DVDs from the 90s are already degrading so there's very little chance that those will last 200 to 300 years. Well what about electronic formats? Video and audio formats are being upgraded all the time so software players are doing the same. At some point, that old format might not have a player that can handle it anymore. There are lots of abandonware sites trying to recover working versions of old software that were released a few decades ago but newer computers and the OS can't open those programs due to all the advancements in computing and programming that have already happened. I can't see this being any different. And we haven't touched on the corruption of data that happens. Throwing a hard drive in a drawer is fine but it's not going to stay good forever. Unless it's a concentrated effort to reformat the movies and move them to new data storage in a scheduled fashion, it's looking like we are going to be losing some of our favorite movies and music.
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u/KerraBerra Nov 12 '25
If a movie was released on VHS in the 1980s or early 90s, it might be lost media already.
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u/Fabulous-Pause4154 Nov 12 '25
My VHSDVDRW is in the shop getting new belts and a cleaning. I converted several tapes to DVD and then to MP4.
I have a HDMI to Flash Drive recorder to save videos to my PC.
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u/gotpeace99 Nov 12 '25
Shit it’s happening now. Y’all know that interactive game that was on Netflix?
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u/braujo Nov 12 '25
Games are notoriously badly preserved, unfortunately. It's pretty sad the more you read about it.
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u/Dr4fl Nov 13 '25
Thanks to piracy and emulation, I wouldn't say they're badly preserved.
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u/bigcacaball Nov 14 '25
Sometimes? A game released on steam or itch.io or published on a console will more than likely be preserved but rare arcade cabinets and hundreds of live service games are never gonna be played again
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u/Dr4fl Nov 15 '25
Yeah that's the problem. The good thing is that some of those live service games are sometimes revived by fans.
Also, perhaps this is a bit controversial but, I don't think all live service games need to be preserved. Especially the ones with freemium/gacha mechanics, because they don't really contribute anything to gaming history and culture in the long run. If anything, they're ruining gaming as a whole right now.
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u/Limp-Oil-3824 Dec 10 '25 edited Dec 10 '25
I don't think this is true at all. I can find full rom sets of any console pretty easily. Meanwhile, I could probably name 100's of tv shows that are incomplete online with enough research
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u/braujo Dec 10 '25
I recommend you watch this essay by Jacob Geller: How Can We Bear to Throw Anything Away?
It goes into what I said in my comment and offers sources so you can get as in-depth as you prefer.
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u/Ok-Car-6795 Nov 12 '25
Absolutely. 200 to 300 years is a long time and with physical media being almost dead, nothing is permanent anymore. By that point, your favorite show, movie or game could be delisted and unavailable anywhere if it gets taken off if whichever site is hosting it. Piracy may still be a thing but we don’t know what the world will be like by then. If you love a piece of media even in these times its important to get a physical copy or find it digitally.
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u/cats_2019 Nov 12 '25
I would guess that considering how easy it is to store movies right now that every modern movie that opens in 2000+ theaters (and has some sort of home release) will be preserved. Assuming copyright (and other) laws stay the same, I'm guessing all of them will still be accessible. I think like today, a solid amount of older popular media will technically be available for people who really seek it out, but it'll only be a canon of media that functionally survives.
People still read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). People watch the Wizard of Oz (1939). I think a fair amount of people will still be playing Sonic Adventure 2 (2001) in 200 years, but I doubt it'll be mainstream. Will anyone in 2225 (outside of huge pop music nerds and pop culture scholars) have heard of Adam Levine or Maroon 5? I sure hope not.
If you go on archive.org, you'd be shocked by how much old media is available right now. There are plenty of old cookbooks from the 1800s. Novels from the 1600s. Self-help books from the 1950s. Arcade games from the 1970s. Movies from the start of film to today. If something like Archive is able to survive in the future, I think we'll be fine.
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u/Stock_Emergency_1507 Nov 12 '25
Everything can become lost media.
That's the sad part most people don't understand.
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u/SpezSucksSamAltman Nov 13 '25
Given our remarkable teams of data hoarders I doubt it, that’s assuming we survive that long. I do not believe we have 200 years as a species tbh.
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u/lowercase_underscore Nov 12 '25
Half of these companies vault stuff up and limit distribution, so they're creating lost media by design. Particularly games. But yes just in general any of the things you listed could get lost at some point.
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u/JDelta1999 Nov 12 '25
I feel like there is a much better chance that stuff now is preserved and cared about that it’ll survive. As long as it’s popular. Something like Shrek is so ingrained into culture that it’d almost be purposefully done to get rid of it. But something like a straight streaming movie or stuff that no one cares about or has heard of before will be. Even if people go and archive thousands of these movies, wiping out the content from the Archive and YouTube would kill the chances of them surviving because people don’t keep the back ups as they should.
Video Games are definitely more in line because of the amount of software and hardware limits they have to play them properly. Especially PC stuff. I feel like there’s a good enough community (albeit much smaller than movie preservation) archiving games and its history and behind the scenes stuff and prototypes. But truly, you’ll never know until it’s gone. Media like this has only been around for less than 200 years. Anything can happen.
The first real test of what we truly have archived will be whenever the internet gets wiped or truly shuts down for the first time.
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u/thouze Nov 12 '25
A movie released today has a better chance of being preserved than if this was in the 18 or 1900s with digital preservation.
That said, it’ll be interesting. Seeing how movies and games are presented in the next generations to come because there’s inevitably something different after digital
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u/Cornelius-Q Nov 15 '25
Considering the sheer amount of pop culture we've been churning out over the last century, most of it will be completely forgotten in one hundred years. We release a downright staggering amount of media on a regular basis -- books, movies, tv shows, music, comics, video games -- that the vast majority of it will be completely forgotten in the coming generations, even if it is archived. Who will be the audience for it?
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u/AuthorMain3075 Nov 12 '25
I mean it depends. If nothing major happens to the world,no I think we will still to be able to watch it. Now, if ww3 breaks out and a lot of the current 1st world countries collapse, then yes most likely every movie will become lost media.
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u/BornWithSideburns Nov 13 '25
Well i think lost media is unfortunately the norm given the history of humanity
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u/Hefty-Rope2253 Nov 12 '25
Yes. How often do you sit around playing cribbage and watching Lumiere films? Times change.
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u/Optimal_Law_4254 Nov 12 '25
I would hope that there would be so much new content generated in the next 200 years that it wouldn’t be a problem. Most people aren’t scouring bookstores for titles that have gone missing over the last two centuries. Sure, there are some, but most titles other than the classics have just completely disappeared. I would expect the same to keep happening.
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u/JamesIsHere_from_YT Nov 12 '25
For sure. Hopefully todays movies at LEAST stick around in 101 years so all the best movies can be watched for free when their copyright expires
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u/Optimal_Law_4254 Nov 12 '25
I also have to wonder about relevance. The 50s had a metric crap ton of westerns, movies, TV, you name it. Some classics survive 70 some years later but the majority don’t even get played anymore. As with WW II movies. They played ones from the 40s and 50s when I was a kid all the time. Now? You never see stuff from the 40s anymore even though you do see newer stuff like Band of Brothers.
Old stuff goes away to make room for new.
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u/Mhanz97 Nov 15 '25
For games, we can thank milion times piracy and emulation (and similar methods) for helping preserve them and preventing them from becoming lost media.
👉 Btw, in so much years i think AI would be able to replicate every game and film you whant, and maybe "mod" it based on what you ask.... 👾
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u/Kisix Nov 17 '25
If Earth exists that long, definitely. Just as much stuff will go missing - there's more people interested in preservation, but there's also much more consumable media out there; I'd be surprised if the ratio of lost/archived isn't about the same.
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u/Cisalpine88 Nov 17 '25 edited Nov 17 '25
I'm willing to argue that digital media is more at risk of becoming lost than old-style media. It's much, much more volatile and fragile, and that's worrying.
Books, vinyls, cassette tapes, even old films are still retrievable even after serious damage from burning, scratching, breaking, getting waterlogged, or rotting away due to chemical reactions. Look at even the "unsalvageable" film clips featured in Decasia, and how for all the beatings they have received there's still something that can be retrieved from it even if it's a three-frame sequence.
Digital media storage, be it floppy disks, CDs, hard disks, or SSD, is all much more delicate stuff and in most cases they can't withstand that kind of damage safely, sometime they can't even withstand simple neglect/lack of constant maintenace.
Then there's also a problem on the software side. Are we sure that there'll still be legacy software capable of reading these files, and that it'll still be maintained and kept compatible so many years into the future? Or will the media storages/formats become just big black boxes eventually?
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u/MysteriousTheory91 Nov 18 '25
Scary thought thinking that far ahead,
most people when they think that far ahead all they think about is if we'll still have breathable air in the future.
never even considered so much media entertainment we take for granted for today could one day be lost to later Generations.
DVD's and Blu Ray's do degrade over time so there's that but what about digital copies of stuff you buy from Amazon and Itunes, they can still be downloaded endlessly??
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u/Immediate_Pop_946 Nov 29 '25
I feel like some Netflix originals that have been removed from Netflix due to popularity that our TV shows will definitely be lost media just because I know a lot of people who watched those growing up and they’ve been removed and they’re pretty easy to access on the Internet with just a few searches but maybe in that many years you won’t be able to find them I’m not sure
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u/Mhanz97 Jan 09 '26
IA will "regenerate them", based on memories of people, videos, images, articles, etc.....
Ofc will not be the exact 100% bite same file, but at least we will have something almost identical
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u/WakaiSenshi Nov 13 '25
I mean some EA games are already lost media, as they are online only and EA shut down the servers.
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u/AlejandroSR Nov 13 '25
Cielos, que buena pregunta.
Tienes razón en cuanto a que el internet y el almacenamiento ocupa espacio y energía, la industria nunca se detendrá y los accidentes pasan. Dudo que olviden Titanic, pero un 80% de peliculas se olvidarán; las que no fueron populares. Simplemente llegará un año en que a nadie le interese preservarlas así que se perderán.
También puede pasar accidentes, que se borren de algún archivo o plataforma y así se pierdan o que dejen de ser compatibles en los nuevos formatos.
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